A virtual party can strengthen the togetherness of your remote teams and create a positive work atmosphere for the coming year. The pressure is on to deliver a festive experience that employees will be talking about (in a good way!) for months to come, but… where do you even start?
How can you create an exciting, inclusive remote holiday party that gets the whole team involved, gets buy-in from management, and gets everyone hyped up to be a part of it?
In this article we’ll be taking a look at some of the problems HR encounters when they’re in the planning stage, some key factors to keep in mind, and some party ideas that will ensure everyone shows up and engages — wherever they might be in the world.
Common Problems with Most Remote Parties
Many remote parties fizzle because organizers don’t take into account the true needs of their remote teams.
It could be that HR is trying to turn an in-person styled event into a remote event, that some employees feel excluded from the festivities, or that the event doesn’t prioritize interactivity and real connection between team members.
These are some of the common virtual party fails that we see:
They’re boring!
A done-to-death party idea is a recipe for no-shows.
We’ve all reluctantly received invites to end of year work dos that we know are going to be a snore fest. And despite our secret hopes of somehow managing to get out of things, we’ve had to reluctantly attend these parties as a show of solidarity to our teammates.
But when a remote party sounds like it’s going to be really boring, it’s all too easy for team members to simply say “Oops, I totally forgot!” or “Sorry, I tried to connect to the event, but the dog ate my wifi router”.
Not to worry, now you’re in the hot seat to plan a virtual holiday event that people will not only want to attend, but will be raving about afterwards. Read on to get to the good stuff!
Long speeches from C-Suite
It’s tradition for management and execs to give what they feel are poignant, inspiring end-of-year speeches to their teams.
But in reality, this is often not the case. And these speeches can be even more difficult to sit through when employees are sitting at home with more exciting things to do.
We’ll cover how to manage over-enthusiastic CEO presentations in a moment.
No connectivity or bonding between employees
In a recent Statista survey, 15% of remote workers reported loneliness as their biggest struggle with working remotely. People often don’t have the time or opportunity to form real connections with their team members during their work day.
There might not be any proactive efforts within their organization to establish greater engagement and connectivity, so prioritizing them at remote holiday parties may not be taken into consideration either.
If there is no intentional effort to connect employees on the call and get them interacting, it will feel like more of a festive meeting than a virtual party.
Feels like a chore to attend
Complicated virtual festivities can make what should be a fun event feel like more work if it’s not promoted properly.
Keep the communication around the party simple and inviting, while still giving enough detail that attendees know what to expect. However you approach this, it should get your teams excited to attend, because work is the last thing on your employees’ minds when the year is coming to a close!
Things to Keep in Mind When You’re Planning Your Party
Define your goal
As with any other HR initiatives, it’s important to start with the overarching goal of your party.
For example, will it need to:
- Recognize and celebrate team and individual achievements over the year?
- Help employees get to know each other better?
- Include team-building exercises?
- Encourage reflection and gratitude?
- Reinforce your company values and culture?
- All of the above?
Starting with the “why” of your party can help you map out a virtual event that achieves your ultimate goal.
Keep it inclusive
As we mentioned above, one of the most important factors that will contribute to a high-engagement, enjoyable virtual party is inclusivity and accessibility.
It’s important to keep the diversity of your employees in mind, as this can influence the overall goals, activities, and themes of your virtual event.
This means paying particular attention to:
- Where employees are located
- Religious themes (e.g. not everyone celebrates Christmas)
- Cultural differences
- What people may/may not have in their home (e.g. people might not have an oven for baking cookies)
- Personal values
- Whether employees have partners or family they’d like to invite to the event
- Dietary requirements if you’re sending out meal kits
- If they partake in drinking alcohol or not
Set the time and date
For distributed global teams, it can be tricky to find a party time that works for everyone. To include as many people as possible, you’ll also need to factor in your employees’ personal schedules and plans, and try to work around these. End of year can be a pretty hectic time for everyone.
If your employees are unable to attend the event live due to their time zone, make sure they are compensated in some way for this. You could also set up an asynchronous holiday party chat room in Slack or Google Hangouts to help these team members feel connected and respected.
Alternatively, you could host separate regional virtual parties to ensure everyone can show up live and connect with their nearest team members at a time that works for them.
Budget
Getting buy-in from executives and stakeholders for a great virtual party is key to its success. It’s essential to approach this from a strategic angle, and tie the event to your organization’s overall goals.
Proving that a rich, interactive event will help employees to feel less isolated, get to know their peers, increase their overall job satisfaction, and reduce the risk of quitting can all help your cause (and the size of your party budget).
Guest list
A “virtual holiday party” suggests that everyone in your organization will be invited. But sometimes this isn’t feasible, or desirable.
For example:
- Do you have enterprise-sized teams that will make the event difficult to manage, and hard for employees to connect with each other properly? If so, you might need to plan multiple parties. You could organize these by department, or randomize them to encourage new connections across teams.
- If you are planning to run a company-wide party, will you need to hire or assign moderators and co-hosts to help organize and direct the event, and manage breakout rooms for smaller groups?
- Will it be impossible to arrange one party that works for everyone’s time zones?
Sorting out your guest list well in advance can help you plan a party (or parties) that will make your event a lot more manageable and enjoyable for everyone involved.
CEO involvement
Your virtual holiday party is the perfect opportunity for executives to connect with employees, and vice versa. But as we discussed above, CEOs can sometimes get a little carried away with end of year speeches.
So If your CEO insists on addressing employees during your holiday event, give them a time budget of 3-5 minutes, and discreetly remind them when this time is up. For example, have some wrap-up music ready as a cue.
If the CEO is receptive to this, make suggestions for their address to be interactive, and ask the attendees for input.
One idea is to get your CEO to ask everyone on the call to put in the chat what they thought were the greatest achievements of the team during the past year, and then crafting their responses into a toast on the spot and moving on after the cheers.
This involves the team, keeps everyone engaged, and the CEO still gets the spotlight for a few moments.
Choose your party hosting platform
It’s important to get your tech stack ironed out in advance, so you can keep the party momentum going, and troubleshoot on the spot if you need to.
Platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams typically have everything you need for a virtual event, but if you’re going to require extra apps to host your party, make sure you’ve tried and tested them, and that your employees have downloaded anything they need from their side before the day of the party.
Ensure maximum attendance
Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your virtual party, getting the word out to employees and building excitement will be the key to ensuring people remember to show up on the day.
Communicate early and often with employees in the lead up to your events, and share the events and activities you’re planning so people know what to expect, and can plan for the party at home in advance if needed.
We suggest giving people 3 to 4 week’s notice (at least) of the company’s party date, and revealing the important details. Then send out a teaser every week of what to expect at the party as reminders. Keep it fun and engaging!
Send final reminders to people about the party the day before the event, and the day of the event, to ensure maximum attendance.
Keep it fun and interactive
Bringing remote employees together should encourage participation, in a way that’s fun and inclusive for people of every age and demographic — whether they’re a quiet introvert or the life of the party.
When you’re planning virtual activities, it’s essential to ensure that nobody is left out. Keep a focus on activities that will enable everyone to participate, speak, and share their thoughts and ideas during the event. Don’t worry we have lots of ideas, keep reading!
Consider possible gift taxes
If you’re giving gifts as part of your holiday party, do your homework first to see if there will be any tax implications for your remote employees. If your gifts will incur tax for local or global employees, be transparent about this so that they don’t get any unwanted surprises at tax time.
In the US, taxable gifts are considered to be:
- Cash payments, or something that is redeemable for cash (e.g. a points system)
- Gift cards
- Any gift worth over $100
However, US holiday gifts might fall under the category of “de minimis fringe benefits”, which means they could qualify for exemption.
10 Fun Virtual Holiday Party Ideas for Your Organization
Holiday themed gratitude session
The start of any virtual party is a fantastic opportunity for employees to reflect on their year, and think about who and what they’re thankful for in their lives.
Here are a few prompts you can use to get people unmuting themselves and sharing what they’re grateful for in the chat:
- What are your three more favorite smells during the holiday season?
- What memory did you make this year that brings a smile to your face?
- Who on your team helped you the most this year that you are grateful for?
If you want to leave this to the experts, you can book a private gratitude session with Bright Breaks that will be led by a professional instructor who can take everything off your plate and kick off your party in a meaningful and inspirational way.
Icebreakers
If your team members don’t know each other that well, icebreaker games such as “Two Truths and a Lie” or “Would You Rather” can be a great way to get your virtual event headed in the right direction, and ensure there aren’t any awkward silences as people ease into party mode.
Icebreakers can also be simple questions that employees take turns to answer. If you’re doing this, and if your team size allows for it, you can ask several questions and go around the group a few times so that people can share more about themselves.
You can find some great ideas for holiday-themed icebreaker questions here. Remember to keep your questions light-hearted and inclusive to ensure a relaxed, open atmosphere.
Employee awards ceremony
Employees appreciate being recognized for all their hard work, and 82% of employees say that recognition increases their happiness and job satisfaction. But they also want to have fun at your virtual party. Awards ceremonies can be a great way to get the best of both worlds.
Your awards can be as creative, humorous, or inspiring as you want to make them. The key thing to ensure is that they’re relevant to your company culture, accessible to everyone, and have a positive focus.
The best way to do this is to let your employees have their say in creating award ideas, and voting for the winners. Your teams will always have the best knowledge of in-jokes and work-related bloopers, so they can develop awards that are both relevant, and help with deeper connectivity and engagement during your virtual party.
Give employees 2 to 3 weeks lead time to participate in conceptualizing the awards and voting. This is a great way to keep the upcoming party top-of-mind and build excitement as the date nears. Get managers and team leads involved in coming up with awards and ensuring their teams take the time to vote.
It’s simple to create a Google form with the list of finalized awards, and then send this out to employees who can secretly nominate who they think should win each category.
Some ideas to get creative juices flowing include:
- Best gif responses in Slack
- Person whose pet showed up most on Zoom calls
- Zoom call blooper award (e.g. person who always forgets they’re not muted)
- Coffeeholic award
- “Reporting live” award – for the person who’s most likely to be “on location” during meetings
- Award for the person who constantly delivers the best puns
- Ray of sunshine award for the person who constantly brings positive vibes to the team
Design a fun, creative slideshow to reveal the winners during the party. See if there is an especially enthusiastic leader who would like to host this portion of the party to keep the vibe fresh.
To avoid the risk of this being “just a slide show”, ensure it’s interactive by asking attendees to guess who won each award in the chat before revealing the winner. This keeps engagement high and makes it fun for everyone!
Should you give a prize to the winners?
It’s up to you whether your awards ceremonies include prizes for the winners, or whether it’s simply a shoutout situation where the recognition itself is the reward.
If you do want to give prizes, you can either send gift cards, or choose prizes that are relevant for each award. For example, you might send the winner of your Coffeeholic Award a pack of their favourite coffee and a fancy mug to enjoy it in.
Virtual cooking class
A celebratory meal can be just what your employees need to finish their work year in style. And for remote teams, it’s as simple as attending a Zoom call.
Depending on where your employees live, the size of your party, and your budget, there are a few approaches you can take with this.
- Send virtual gift cards to your employees so they can buy the ingredients they need to make their favorite dish at home, and then share what they’re cooking with everyone on the call. Hoppier is a great platform to help you organize this.
- Arrange a virtual cooking masterclass where recipes and ingredients are delivered to your team members so they can all cook together.
- Hire a virtual chef from somewhere like CocuSocial or Kitchen On Fire to walk your employees through creating an outstanding holiday meal, and send them the ingredients (or a gift card to buy them) so they can cook along in real time.
If you like the idea of everyone sharing a meal but aren’t keen on the logistics of arranging a cooking class, you could simply treat everyone to their favourite local takeout, Uber Eats, or similar so they don’t need to think about cooking at all!
Trivia & Quizzes
Everyone loves a good trivia challenge, and these are simple activities to run as part of your online event. You can set them up as “team vs team” challenges to encourage some friendly rivalry, or run individual quizzes that test people’s wit, knowledge, or even karaoke abilities. A service like TeamBuilding can help you organize your trivia events from start to finish.
There are also apps like Kahoot, TriviaMaker, and Crowdpurr which can help you create and choose a huge variety of games and challenges to keep your employees engaged, and get to know each other at the same time.
Interactive online games
If you’re planning an online games session, make sure that any games you choose fit with your team culture, and are simple to understand and play. If they’re not accessible for everyone, or there’s a learning curve before people can jump in and play, this can start feeling like work for your teams, and lower your engagement levels.
Get some game idea inspiration at:
If you’d rather have a professional handle the planning and implementation of your remote party games, companies like Teamazing, and TeamBuilding can help you create game experiences that all your employees can enjoy during the party.
Scavenger hunt
Scavenger hunts might seem a little outdated, but they’re a really popular event for remote parties, and everyone can easily get into the competitive spirit with this.
All you need to do is give employees a list of items to find in their home and bring back to their desk (or take photos of them for a live stream) as fast as possible.
Just make sure your scavenged items are things that all your employees will have (even if they’re tricky to find) — and make sure that they’re not things that might be heavy or dangerous.
For example, everyone probably owns a pair of scissors, but you don’t want to encourage people to grab scissors and then run back to their desk with them!
Some ideas and themes for your scavenger hunt list might include:
- Kitchen items
- Clothing items
- “Things that are…” (e.g. blue, warm, or items that make a noise)
- Mobile phone photos of specific things
- Things you can’t live without
If your teams need something a little more challenging, you can also present each scavenger hunt item as a riddle that they need to solve before going to find the item. There are some great riddle examples here to get you started.
Online escape room
Online escape rooms are a great idea to encourage your employees to work together in a Zoom call environment to solve practical problems.
You can form random teams of people if you’d like employees to get to know other people in your organization, or create a team vs team challenge — it’s up to you.
There are plenty of companies that run excellent virtual escape room challenges for teams (e.g. The Escape Game and Escapely), so you can leave all the setup and complexities to the professionals. This is obviously a huge bonus when you have a ton of other things to organize to ensure your party runs smoothly on the day!
Murder mystery
Similar to the escape room challenge, you can hire companies like Escapely to run a virtual murder mystery that helps connect your teams and test their sleuthing abilities.
Actors play out scenes on a Zoom call, and your employees will need to question their suspects and come to a conclusion about who the murderer is. It’s like a virtual version of the classic Cluedo game.
If you’ve only got a limited budget (and your employees want to try out their acting skills), you can create a DIY version of this virtual game where a few people from your team play the characters, and the other employees try to figure out who the culprit is.
Wrapping up
End of year parties are the perfect chance for your employees to reflect on their year, wind down, and celebrate all the great work they’ve done alongside their team members. A seven minute Bright Breaks team gratitude session is the perfect opportunity for them to do this, and it’s a meaningful way to get your holiday celebrations underway.
Once your event has finished, don’t forget to review what worked and what didn’t, and what you can optimize for next year. Get your employees involved in the review process too, so you can encourage greater participation and real human connection for your future virtual events.
We also recommend you share a recap of your holiday party in your general channel on Slack, or similar. This could include:
- Screenshots
- The employee awards slide deck
- People who won prizes
- Notable highlights of the event
Recaps let people who couldn’t attend see what they missed, and it’s a great way to preserve memories for people who were involved.
